Just when I thought I had identified all the gulls on the river bank near where I live, I learned that there are actually two types of black-backed gulls: lesser and greater. I checked back on my first post about black-backed gulls, and at least I had named it correctly--or better yet, the Merlin app told me the right name when I plugged it in. I never thought about the name that if there's a greater one, there might be a lesser one. When I realised this, I had to research the difference between the two. Often the differences are subtle when two different birds are a slightly different species (cackling vs. Canada geese; lesser vs. greater scaups, for example), and it isn't always easy to tell them apart. What I learned about the great and lesser black-backed gulls is that the main difference is that the lessers have yellow legs, and the greaters have pink legs. Having learned this, it made me go back through my photos to see if I had any photos of the lesser ones because I hadn't realised there was a difference, and I wasn't paying attention to looking at their legs.
As it turns out, I did indeed capture a lesser black-backed gull in just one of my photos, but I didn't know it at the time. I did pop it into Merlin just to be sure, and then it came up with yet another option for a species: the yellow legged gull. Good grief! The thing even looked similar. But I've done some more researching and based on the colours in various breeding seasons and what not, I'm confident this is a black-backed gull. I now want to keep looking out at the gull populations to see if I can spot more of them and maybe get a few more photos. For now, I'm going to put them both side by side so you can see the difference between the two sets of legs. Anything else you can spot? I can't, except for maybe a slightly lighter grey in the lesser, and that might only be due to its age since they take a few years to develop full adult colours, and both are not fully developed!
Lesser black-backed gull above. Greater black-backed gull below.
From early July 2021, I just wanted to add a few more photos of the lesser black-backed gull. I've discovered that they're much more numerous than the great black-backed gulls in my area. But both seem to be about the same size. I still keep thinking there's an albatross coming my way when I happen to see one fairly head on, even though I've never seen an albatross in real life! I guess it's what I imagine they would look like, but if I ever do see one, I think they are larger than these gulls, so I'm sure I'll still be in disbelief.
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